Beneath the Waves, a two part short story
by Cheesus333
Summary: A little glimpse into the demented mind of everyone's favourite gene junkie - the common Splicer.
1. Chapter 1

"Shit." I yelled as the lead slug burrowed its way into my gut. "Shit, shit, _shit!" _

I raised the hand-warm Revolver in my right hand shakily, and unloaded 6 rounds into the masked face of the woman who had just shot me.

"It's _my_ Adam! Mi-" Her defiant cry was cut short by the first of these bullets slicing her tongue apart, then finding its way through her hyper-spliced brain and erupting out in a shower of grey matter, blood, and fragments of skull cap.

"_Bitch!" _I spat, and kicked her limp corpse after struggling to my feet. I was bleeding, a lot, mostly from the hole in my abdomen but crimson was beginning to seep from the corner of my mouth too. I was short. I needed my fix soon.

Where was... there, there it is. The glowing scarlet hypo containing that most precious substance lay discarded by its long-dead owner amidst some rubble, bright and conspicuous in the dull grey scree. I scrambled over to it, sure that I was alone in my pursuit of it now, and after wiping most of the filth off the needle, stabbed it deep into my wrist.

It didn't sting anymore. I suppose it might have done, the first few times, but if it had I don't remember. My time before Adam was blurred in places... non-existent in some. The hunt for this stuff was my life now, it was all I lived for.

I depressed the plunger, slowly, savouring the feeling of the liquid in my veins. My heartbeat accelerated, my muscles tensed up then relaxed in mere fractions of seconds, my pupils shrank to pinholes. This was the rush, this was the feeling I had killed so many for.

It never got old.

"_Fuck!" _I screamed in my ecstasy, bursting into fits of manic laughter. "Fuck, that just never stops bein' so good!" I looked around, unsure of where I actually was. I had chased Jessie the Junky (my euphemistic nickname for female Splicers that I didn't actually know) for at least a mile through the city, so I could be anywhere in a mile's radius of Arcadia. _Screw that,_ I thought to myself, _There'll be more Adam here. Arcadia was a ghost town._

"A ghost town in a ghost city. Interesting idea," I pondered aloud to the silence.

As the Adam euphoria began to fade, the world darkened again and the pain in my gut returned – and not gently either. I clamped my hand around the wound, and looked around in hope of a medkit or First Aid station.

My desired prize was found on the corpse of Jessie, her bifurcated tongue lolling comically out of her soundless, still-screaming mouth. I recovered the kit, spitting on her corpse for added insult. In doing so, I caught sight of myself in a shard of the broken mirror she seemed to have kept on her person (_Bet it wasn't broken until she saw herself_, I thought idly). The reflection wasn't a pretty one.

My eyes were sunken and as red as the blood that pooled around my shoes. My pupils were barely visible in the vast scarlet oceans of my irises, and looking into my own eyes was like looking into the Devil's. My nose had never recovered properly from being smashed with a brick on New Years Eve '59, and was crooked at an odd angle to my face that was far from the perpendicular it should be. Closer to parallel, I suppose. My lips were pulled back from my mouth, showing jagged, dirty teeth that I swore had bits of human flesh in them. Hell, when a guy gets you in a headlock, you do whatever the fuck you can to get out, right? The entire canvas of my face was a mess, a regular freak show. I grunted my disgust, and returned to the task at hand.

When the bloody hole in my abdomen was suitably plugged, I retrieved my Revolver – 'Justice', I called her – and set off on my way.

But... where? Where was my way?

Where was _I_, for that matter?

A long, pained groan silenced my thoughts. I dived into the shadows of the piles of plaster and debris, and listened.

I knew that groan.

_Everyone_ knew that groan.


	2. Chapter 2

I suppose I must have heard the girl before her lumbering guardian. Mr. Bubbles, they called them, their cute little affectionate nickname for their brutal protectors. This one seemed to have settled on Mr. B.

"Come _on_, Mr. B! The _angels_!"

More euphemisms. Angels, of course, were the Adam-filled remains of the unfortunate down here in this Hell. Well, they could dress it up how they liked, but a corpse is a fuckin' corpse. And an Adam thief is a fuckin' Adam thief.

_My _Adam. It's _mine!_

I had to plan this carefully; something told me Mr. B would hardly be pleased with me putting a slug in the little bitch's head. A drill-through-the-chest kind of hardly pleased. How could I ensure my pickings would go unhindered?

The answer came to me easier than I might have imagined.

It was already laid out for me, like the city was calling out for an execution. The wire. The brick. The shotgun. All perfectly ready.

I looked at the setup carefully, checking to make sure this would actually work. Once satisfied, I waited for the pawns to step into position.

There she stood, hovering over Jessie with her big, nasty needle. Invasive, I imagine. Not pleasant in the least. And there was he, scanning the room for hostiles. Evidently, he wasn't very thorough.

I readied Justice, and kissed the barrel for luck. The steel was still cold. It was always cold, cold like the icy hearts of those we killed. I lined up the shot, and pulled the trigger.

The aforementioned brick had been caught on a hook in the wall, and someone had tangled a wire around it, which in turn was tethered to a ceiling crossbeam above Mr. B's large, spherical headpiece. My bullet caught the hook, freeing the brick and sending it in a fast arc towards a small porthole window in the hulking mass' helm. As planned, the glass cracked and fell into the dome. Lights all across the body of the metal gient turned a deep crimson as he furiously scoured the area for his assailant. It didn't take him long to see me, smoking gun still held out.

Good.

I grabbed the shotgun resting in some unlucky bastard's long-dead grasp, and leapt over my cover. The Big Daddy fired up his drill, but not fast enough to stop the barrel of my newly-acquired shotgun through his cracked porthole. I shoved the weapon as deep in as it would go, until the pump was all the way through, and pulled the trigger.

The ensuing blast was followed first by the late shriek of a young child, then the wind-down of a moving drill, and finally a long, mournful moan. The 'invincible' guardian was thoroughly defeated. I felt proud.

I released the handle of the shotgun, and shook off a little blood that had clung to my hand. Justice was extended out towards the young creature before me. She whimpered weakly, and retreated into a column. I intended to make her execution fast and painless, like her protector's. No need to draw the process out; she was still a little girl, after all, and the sooner she was out of the way the sooner her Adam was mine. I pressed the end of my Revolver into her forehead. A tear rolled down her cheek.

A hate-filled roar erupted from behind me, followed immediately by inhumanly fast footfalls on the old, cracked tiles.

_No,_ I thought in the few seconds that preceded my demise, _Nononono, that's not fair._

A drill fired up as the footsteps lost their distance from me.

_That's not fair! That's not _fucking _ fair! _

Pain like you wouldn't believe were possible shot out like a supernova from the small of my back. It had all happened before I even had a chance to turn halfway. But the morbid, sadistic grin on the scratty little bitch before me had not escaped my notice.

The tip of a drill burst into my periphery, followed by most of my blood and what I would swear was some digestive organ I was never supposed to see. The drill wound down for a second, as if this slave-like beast were savouring my suffering, before spinning up and retreating back the way it came. Blood fell in torrents, like a daemonic waterfall from the tunnel in my waist, and I sank to my knees, then fell on my side.

_This is it, then? This is really how I make my fucking exit?_

More and more blood pooled around me as the world turned a blurry red. My head pounded against itself, as if my brain were trying to escape a sinking ship.

_All the days of my life, everything I've ever seen and done and said, just to bleed out alone dozens of fathoms away from anyone who would even give a shit._

The girl hopped up onto the shoulder of her newfound father, and with the same heavy footfalls, made their way out of the area.

_Must it really end here?_

_Yes... I suppose it must._

_It ends._


End file.
